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34 Days to Government Information Liberation
2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization. The 1990s represent some of the best and brightest efforts of advocacy, thinking and study about the future prospects of government information services in libraries -- here are some of the highlights (by no means complete; I will try to fill in more of the missing pieces in my subsequent posts) Coming on the heels of OTA's Informing the Nation report, government information librarians were ready and willing to weigh in on the future of the federal depository library program in particular, and the role of libraries in the civic machinery of federal government information. The decade began with a set of principles from the American Library Associations Governemnt Documents Roundtable -- published in Documents to the People, v.19:1 (March 1991):12, 14. Soon after, a separate group of libraries came together around the issue and formed a coalition called the Dupont Circle Group, which issued its own set of principles, hosted a national conference, and made some specific recommendations on who the depository library program might change. A year or so later, another loose affiliation of library groups came together with their own recommendations. The Coalition of Many Associations Framework debated many of the points rasied by the Dupont Circle effort, and issued its own report -- "Enhanced Library Access and Dissemination of Federal Government Information: A Framework for Future Discussion." Working Document endorsed by the American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Special Libraries Association, 1995. American Association of Law Libraries Newsletter 27, no. 1 (September 1995): 14-15. Not to be left out of the picture, the Depository Library Council issued its own statement on the challenges ahead -- Depository Library Council to the Public Printer (U.S.). "Alternatives for Restructuring the Depository Library Program: A Report to the Superintendent of Documents and the Public Printer from the Depository Library Council." September 1993. Administrative Notes 16, no. 16 (December 5, 1995): 23-59. But wait -- there's more. ALA devoted significant chunks of its 1995 midwinter and summer conference to the issues -- and issued a report: * "Model for 'New Universe' of Federal Information Access and Dissemination: Preliminary Results of Forum on Government Information Policy, July 20-21, 1995, Sponsored by American Library Association." ALAWON, ALA Washington Office Newsline 4, no. 77 (August 9, 1995). But then, the National Commission on Library and Information Science considered the problem, and issued its own set of principles, following work they did back in 1990. GPO weighed into the fray -- and issued its own considerations -- "Report to the Congress: Study to Identify Measures Necessary for a Successful Transition to a More Electronic Federal Depository Library Program as required by Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 1996. Public Law 104-53." Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. June 1996. But wait there is more ... In 1996-7, GPO issued to other strategic documents -- "Study to Identify Measures Necessary for a Successful Transition to a More Electronic Federal Depository Library Program" and THE ELECTRONIC FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARY PROGRAM: TRANSITION PLAN, FY 1996 - FY 1998 Finally, and again -- remember I am only touching on the highlights of ten years here -- NCLIS returned to the problem and issued its own massive report on the problem of public information in a digital age following on a large-scale national effort during 1999-2000: A COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION DISSEMINATION FINAL REPORT -- JANUARY 26, 2001 I am tired just thinking about how many brain cells we killed during these ten years trying to get a handle on the future of government information in a digital age. In reviewing this good work, I am reminded of the phrase -- those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Let's not close out this decade with another series of reports or studies -- lets do something about it. I will get back to this exciting decade tomorrow -- after some rest. See you Day 33 Continue reading
35 Days to Government Information Liberation
2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization. Ah, the 1990s....the last decade of the 20th century began with the collapse of the cold war and closed with first hints of the next global struggle (i.e. the war on terrorism.) In between we had political revolutions at home and abroad; economic boom and bust; technological upheavals; and the beginning of the end of what I call Gutenberg Librarianship. If there were just three themes that bound the decade's narrative together, they would have to be -- 1. Political shifts: the last bastions of the Lyndon Johnson inspired "Great Society" finally disappeared after nearly fifteen years of "government is the problem, not the solution" drumbeat by conservative pundits and elected officials. By mid-decade, with the Republican take over of the congress, the last years of the Clinton administration would reinvent this mantra into something called "reinventing government" -- better technology will deliver public programs and services more efficiently and smaller government will be "ok". Librarians and their associations would spend much of this decade debating how their bibliographic institutions will fit into the rapidly evolving "national information infrastructure." Unlike the comparable discussions of the late 1970s which led to enactment of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (primarily fostered by the many reports of the Commission on Federal Paperwork) -- the government reform efforts of the 1990s had the technology readily at had to match their ambitions -- the early grid of what was called the "information superhighway". 2. Technological and regulatory shifts: for the first time in nearly a century the old public service monopoly that bound the telecommunications industry would be overturned by, first, technology and then by changes in public oversight. Just as reinventing government imagined a leaner and more agile public administration culture, so to did the possibilities of a more interactive and consumer-driven model of telecommunication began to take shape -- largely because of the growing world wide web, the rapidly falling prices of expensive computing power, and the interoperability of certain software tools that shifted the communication from textual to graphical interfaces. The late 1990's federal laws governing telecommunications were rewritten and the "public monopoly" granted the telephone and telegraph companies almost 90 years before was lifted. Note too, with two years of these major rewrites, Congress and the President rewrote the laws governing public welfare... 3. Social and economic shifts -- at some point during the decade everyone suddenly felt much less poor, and more able to access, if not demand, many material goods and services once only available to the most affluent just a few short decades ago. Less regulation and government oversight translated into more consumer choices -- in bigger cars, bigger homes, more opportunities to participate in the digital economy through a robust information infrastructure. Public institutions such as libraries, universities, transportation authorities, health care providers, etc. now "had" to compete with an organizational model that presumed the best approach was one that relied on two purposes: it must be driven by the user and must make money or it must be the most cost-effective approach. Against this backdrop of larger social, political and economic developments government information librarians came out of the 1980s talking, debating, thinking, pontificating about how public electronic data products were going to change the way they do business. Rhetorical focus would shift from the culture wars fought over secrecy and privatization of government information to cybercommunities, digital democracy, "keeping the information superhighway free and open to all, and not digital toll roads." One of my favorite conference themes during this time was one that focused on how to keep libraries from being road kill on the information superhighway. Remember -- between the early and late 1990s digital problems for most libraries revolved around the capacity and speed of computers used in their institutions, the used of new fangled media such as CD-ROMs, and how to perform increasingly sophisticated mediated searches using expensive databases such as DIALOG. I many ways, government information librarians were at the bleeding edge of innovation when the Clinton administration decided to embrace the graphical interfaces of the world wide web in late 1995. How the government information librarians reacted to all this change we will leave for tomorrow. See you on Day 34. Continue reading
36 Days to Government Information Liberation
2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization. I said yesterday I would get to the 1990's and reflect on the substantial policy and research analysis created during those ten critical years. But, first, we must step back into the 1980s for a moment and set the stage. I paid homage to Hernon and McClure body of work yesterday -- but I want to put some other national efforts into perspective as well. First, the Association of Research Libraries created something they called the "Task Force on Government Information in Electronic Formats." in the mid-1980s. Following on a report, ARL held several town hall style meetings that helped frame much of the discussion about how and why libraries should incorporate digital government information into their collections and services. This became one of the first set of "principles" produced by libraries about "government information." Here is one version of those principles -- 1. Open exchange of government information should be protected. 2. Federal policy should support the integrity and preservation of government electronic databases. 3. Copyright should not be applied to U.S. Government information. 4. Diversity of sources of access...is in the public interest and entrepreneurship should be encouraged. 5. Government information should be available at low cost. 6. A system to provide equitable, no-fee access to basic public information is a requirement of a democratic society. I have to point out that this effort was also linked to another ARL goal to confront the growing evidence of how the Regan administration was using claims of secrecy and national security to restrict otherwise open and freely available information. In a report called Access to Information it issued in 1985, which followed on a statement from the Council on Library Resources called "Scholarship, Research, and Access to Information." And not to put to fine a point on it -- it is amazing how all of this rushes back into one's memory with a little prompting from the web -- it was also the time when the FBI was conducting an extensive investigation of libraries and their users -- hoping to curtail and arrest the use of sensitive (but not secret) technical information found in many research libraries open collections. The argument was simply this -- taken separately, the technical reports (often government reports) were not classified or secret. But knitted together by a clever foreign agent doing good library research, a string of reports could reveal sensitive (even classified) information. One of the better books on this FBI program is "Surveillance in the Stacks The FBI's Library Awareness Program" by Herbert N. Foerstel. The whole other subtext going on during the 1980s (again anticipating the arguments of the 1990s and early 2000s) centered on the ownership of the public's information. Another set of Regan policies sought to "privatize" as much government work as possible (and this include the privatization of government information.) Years of library debate, rancor, standing in professional meetings with hands on hips and yelling at each other, accusations of selling out, accolades for standing up to the "the man" to protect the public's right to know ... oy vey, those were days when government information librarianship and brawling in the streets were close cousins. I mean, we would get seriously worked up about it ... it is not an exaggeration to say that decades-long friendships broke up over the issue. At the international level, the struggle was framed in terms of something called the "New World Information Order." Based on a report issued by the United Nations, it was a very strong argument that private media companies in first world nations held unfair monopolies around the globe that drowned out different or indigenous information cultures. But, if you think the Depository Library community was asleep or somewhere else during these crazy days -- they were busy hatching plans to include digital information in the depository library system. The culmination of that effort was something called "Informing the Nation". And, yes, Hernon and McClure had their hands in this effort as well as contractors. Prior to this epic, the community was also involved in another effort to get digital information into the depository library system -- in the early 1980s -- the GPO and the Joint Committee on Printing created something called "Ad HocCommittee on Depository Library Access to Federal Automated Databases." Hoduski, by the way, was the chair of this effort. So, again, by the end of the 1980s we have a wealth of policy, research, and experience within the government information library community that deeply considered all of the implications of digital government information. And the web was still five or six years a way from bursting on the scene. See you on Day 35. Continue reading
37 Days to Government Information Liberation
2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization. Since one refers to Hoduski/McKnelly and Malamud as bookends, let's take a look at some of the vast literature written about federal government printing and the depository library system over the last 40 years or so. Think of this a primer for those library school students who plan on taking a government information course next spring. The past is but a prologue, as they say over in the Smithsonian..... First up, let's go back to the 1980s -- when three of the most comprehensive studies of the federal depository library system were completed -- Charles McClure and Peter Hernon, Users of Academic and Public GPO Depository Libraries. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989. p ix. (GP 3.2:US 2). GPO's depository library program : a descriptive analysis / Peter Hernon, Charles R. McClure, Gary R. Purcell. Norwood, N.J. : Ablex Pub. Corp., 1985; Improving the quality of reference service for government publications By Charles R. McClure, Peter Hernon, American Library Association American Library Association, 1983 and this general assessment of information policies -- Public access to government information : issues, trends, and strategies / Peter Hernon, Charles R. McClure. Norwood, N.J. : Ablex Pub. Corp., c1984 I would submit that many of the issues we currently debate over the future and purpose of the depository library system were framed best by these studies. They hit upon the essential problems of purpose that plague the program to this day; problems only slightly changed by the barriers and opportunities of today's technology. We do not need to reinvent this research -- It's there waiting for us return to its home truths. The next stop will be those crazy years in the 1990s. Much policy and purpose to be rediscovered during this time as well. See you on Day 36. Continue reading
Librarians without Libraries?
December 27, 2008 / Leave a comment
In his continuing series about Government Information Liberation, John Shuler considers the role of collections in libraries. One particularly revealing moment in his discussion is his day 60 post in which he describes a series of questions that he poses to his graduate students to get at the "fundamental things we do."
The Question and Conclusions
One would hope that the questions prompt a discussion and don't just end in "dead silence." Although John doesn't tell us what the discussion, if any, was, he does give us his conclusions: possession of "material" might have once been central to the purpose of libraries but, in the digital age, possession is much less important part of what libraries do.
Even though John qualifies his conclusions to allow for some limited role of collections for some libraries, he overwhelms his caveats with assertions that collections begin and end with the physical ownership of "material" and that "we will not own (possess) much of the material." He even coins the phrase "Gutenberg Librarians" to deprecate "possession and/or control" (66) of information by libraries.
So, John's essential, bottom-line conclusion, regardless of his caveats, comes across clearly: The net, John says, has brought on "the beginning of the end" of library collections (35).
I think his conclusion is wrong and the question he asks is misleading. You can see how misleading the question is by turning it around and realizing that the professions/institutions he uses are not parallel:
But the real problem is that the question implies a shared understanding of what a library is -- a shared understanding that I think we need to articulate explicitly. I think that, before one asks "Can you be a librarian without a library?" one should ask "What is the role of the library is in the digital age?" John has been outlining what he thinks the role of librarians should be and he apparently wants to separate the role of librarians from the role of libraries. Very well: let's examine the roles of both with some discussion, not dead silence.
Librarianship
I think John is implying is his series of posts that librarianship in the digital age will be about helping people navigate a complex, networked maze of shifting, changing information. Librarians will help users "connect the dots" and find connections that are not otherwise explicit (47). While there is nothing wrong with this view, and there is much to recommend it, it doesn't go far enough and it misses a key role for libraries.
As John portrays it, this view accepts that libraries will be less about selecting and preserving information and building digital collections and more about providing services for information over which librarians have no control. Librarians, in this view, are valuable precisely because they have no control over information.
This view accepts that information will be tightly controlled by producers and distributors. What is available, who can use it, under what conditions it may be used, and when it becomes no longer available will all be controlled by government agencies, publishers, individuals, organizations, and other "content" producers.
John also proposes that "librarianship" will be more important than "libraries." To me, this sounds like librarians will be analogous to travel agents who, because they deal every day with the complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected systems, are better able than the traveller to navigate these systems and find the best flight at the best price. So librarians, in this view, will help casual information users navigate a variety of complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected, public-freely-available and proprietary-and-licensed information systems. Just as travel agents have no control over what flights or trips are available or what they cost or what restrictions are placed on them, so librarians will have no control over what information is available or what it costs or what restrictions are placed on its use.
In this view, librarians will not manage collections but will license the right to read from those who control information. Whether the license comes in the form of payment of dollars to a commercial vendor and a written contract that licenses access, or an FDLP designation, or a contractual "partnership" with GPO, or the anointing of permission by Google Books legal department, the result is the same. As a recent article in Library Hi Tech says, "In future, librarians will no longer manage media, they will manage rights" (Böhner, Dörte. Digital rights description as part of digital rights management: a challenge for libraries. Library Hi Tech 26, no. 4 (2008): 598-605). This view reshapes the role of librarians from information providers to information gatekeepers; from information curators to business-officers who sign contracts and pay bills.
Who would want to go into that field?
Libraries
John hasn't said much about the role of libraries except to assert that, for many people, the digital environment is now the "default library" [emphasis added] that supports broad access to a "collection" of government information (51).
But, shouldn't we be asking about the future, not just describing the present?
Shouldn't we be asking about the relationships between doctors and lawyers and information? Certainly doctors and lawyers need a body of literature to practice their professions. Instead of asserting that users have access today, shouldn't we be asking, "Who will build and manage and preserve those collections and ensure long-term, free access to them?"
Shouldn't we be asking what guarantees we have that the information we want today will be available if we want it tomorrow? Shouldn't we be asking who controls access to that information and what are their reasons for providing access? Shouldn't we be asking who will pay for long-term preservation and access?
Just because users who are not familiar with information policy, information economics, or information technologies are happy with current access to information does not mean that they will be happy with the access (or lack of it!) tomorrow or in ten years or a hundred years. Providing easy access at one point in time does not guarantee easy access at a future point in time and can actually mask problems of long-term access.
It is one of the roles of librarians to think beyond today and one of the roles of libraries to guarantee access for tomorrow. We need to think about the long-term. Using short-term convenience as a reason for avoiding that kind of thought is evading one of the key roles of librarianship. And assuming that producers and distributors will have the same values and ethics and practices as librarians is to confuse the role of producers with the role of currators.
Maybe the real questions we should be asking are:
The word "library" does not mean "I have some information." If it did, bookstores would be libraries and publishers would be librarians. We need libraries in addition to publishers and bookstores (and government agencies that distribute information as a by-product of another, primary, mission).
It is all about control
Let's be clear, then. Even in the paper and ink world, libraries and their collections were about wresting control of information from producers and distributors and granting control to local communities and information users. A publisher could take a book out of print, but a library could keep it available. A user could purchase a book and pay for magazine subscriptions, but could use the information for free at the library. Libraries leveraged economies of scale for the benefit of the community, enabling every community member to have benefits of access to information that no individual could possibly afford.
The need for wresting control of information away from those who wish to control the access to and the use of information has not changed in the digital world. But the battle lines have shifted and we need librarians in the fight to keep free, open, usable access.
"Content providers" want to replace copyright with license agreements. Producers want to charge for every single use and dictate who can use information, under what conditions, and in what way. Governments want to be able to alter and even withdraw information after it has been released. And the proliferation of requirements to register to read or use information portends a world in which people will not have the right of privacy when reading.
It is ironic that, given technologies that enable almost unlimited use and re-use of information and that enable information to be distributed and used and re-used almost without cost, we face a horde of stakeholders who want to limit access, charge for every use, restrict re-use, and look over your shoulder to see what you're reading.
More inaccurate conclusions
As noted above, John hedges his conclusion a bit. His wording is that "possession is much less exclusive or destiny for any one institution" and preserving and organizing the information sources "will remain important -- but is no longer our exclusive responsibility" (66). He expands on that idea:
And from these, he draws conclusions:
To me, these summarize one possible scenario out of many. And, IMHO, this scenario is not one librarians should be content to accept or embrace. Why? Because it almost certainly guarantees that a lot of bad things will happen: loss of access, loss of free access, licensing constraints, DRM constraints, loss of information, loss of usability of information, and more.
Different Questions, A Different Answers
In a separate post, I will examine those issues in more detail, but I'll close this post with some assumptions and a couple of final rhetorical questions as a way of addressing John's question, "Can you be a librarian without a library?" The assumptions:
The rhetorical questions:
I think those questions lead us to conclusions that are very different from the the ones John reaches. I will examine this in more detail in another post.
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